Michael DeMocker / The Times-Picayune archiveThe original concrete steps sit in the backyard of Tana Barth's Gentilly home on Cameron Boulevard.

NOTE: With the last Carnival float back in the barn, Tana Barth now can turn her attention once again to her home renovation project.

As far as Tana Barth is concerned, Carnival was perfect. Her family owns the Barth Brothers float-building business, and there were no last-minute mishaps that required emergency repairs, no last-minute changes that were difficult to accommodate.

By the time other New Orleanians were heading out to nightly parades, Barth and friends were devoting time to a very different undertaking: the renovation of her flooded Gentilly home.

"It's like the light at the end of a very dark, very long tunnel," Barth said. "Now that every spare minute outside of my job at the animal clinic is not spent at the float barn, I'm really starting to see progress at my house."

Barth said her friend and contractor Jonathan Roux of Allied Electric has been on the scene for several weeks with two helpers.

"Before they could do all the remaining gutting that needed to happen, they had to get up underneath the house and replace some joists that were rotten," Barth said. "The floor inside really wasn't all that safe without doing that work to support it."

Out with the old

Once the structural repairs were made, the crew made progress.

"I've got a big Dumpster sitting in the driveway, and they are real busy over there," Barth said. "They got out all the old pipes and plumbing fixtures, and they took out the remaining Sheetrock and insulation."

In short, she said, they got rid of just about anything that will get in the way of the sparkling rehab that Barth has planned, based on drawings by architect John Wettermark. And while Roux and his team have been occupied with the physical labor, Barth has been busy with the administrative end of the project.

"Around Christmastime, they put up the pole for the temporary electric meter, and now we have power so the guys can work," she said. "I'm in the process of getting water service to the house and setting up an account. We got sets of the blueprints made, and Jonathan dropped off the plans to three plumbers for prices."

Barth's brother Barry is also handy with pipes. And although he has offered to do the work for her, Barth thinks she might want to give him a break.

"He'd absolutely do it for me, I know he would," she said. "But he has his hands full with the business, and I really hate to bother him. I'm not worried -- I know he will give me plenty of advice."

Seal of approval

The biggest milestone was getting the building permit so that the project can progress past the gutting stage.

"We couldn't do a lot of fix-up work yet, because I didn't have the building permit," Barth said. She and Roux went to City Hall on Wednesday with the architect's plans and the elevation certificate, to show that the house has been raised.

"We were in and out in about two hours," she said.

In the meantime, the crew continued with removal of unwanted materials.

"This week, they're tearing off all the old roof materials to make way for the new, and they're taking off all the old vinyl siding," she said. "That means they'll be ready to start as soon as I get back with the permit."

This is the perfect time of year for the project to be ramping up.

"This is the off season in the float business," she said. "I'm all done for now, though my brother stays busy with sculpture and prop-making all year round. We won't start up again until around the end of the summer, when we start whiting out the floats. That gives me almost six months without extra time commitments that I can spend on the house."